• NASA
  • IPAC

Summer Visit - 2025 - IMPULS

The summer visit to Caltech is 4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The IMPULS team came to visit in July 2025. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 6 students.

Quotes

  • [The most surprising thing] was the diversity of kinds of work people did to make these missions a reality.
  • [student:] I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and use math for something that's not just math class.
  • I was impressed by how our team (teachers and students alike) were up for the challenge. They had some long days and were exhausted by the time they went home, but they really embraced the project and seem excited to see where it leads.
  • [Qualities needed for being an astronomer:] Perseverance; gotta be ok with failure and asking questions but also needing to be ok with working on the problem and beating your head against the wall (metaphorically or not) until the problem is solved or until you can put it down for the day and pick it back up. Also critical thinking and problem solving -- encountering problems is going to be common but finding out “why” or leaving some as “unknown” is pivotal; not everything needs to be finite but solving the questions even with “I don’t know but no one else does so its all speculation” is a much needed quality/skill to have. Leaving it as “meh idk and i'll just move on” doesn’t work for many problems.
  • [Qualities needed for being an astronomer:] Curiosity, patience, and grit! You also need to be willing to accept that you don’t have all the answers, and you will need to change your perceptions based on what you observe!

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2025 - IMPULS